Trade in stolen artefacts has always been big business, with many customers and few penalties, writes Michael Jansen in Cyprus
Tomb robbing is said to be the second oldest profession. Men have been plundering tombs and monuments since the dawn of civilisation. People looted the gods and goods of other tribes, or sacked the towns and cities of rivals.
Even revered forebears were not immune. Greeks looted Egyptian tombs, Romans raided the burial grounds of the Greeks and the Etruscans; Constantinople was pillaged by various enemies. The Mongol chief Hulagu threw the grand libraries of Baghdad into the Tigris. Ancient temples were dismantled and their building blocks reused. Pots, statuary and paintings became household objects and trade goods. Wars, earthquakes and civil conflicts provided golden opportunities to plunder on a grand scale.
Since cultural property is a nonrenewable resource, looting constitutes a crime against humanity. When an artefact is taken from its context it loses 80 per cent of its value to historians. Looters destroy sites while despoiling them. The head of Iraq's museum board, Donny George, observed: "An archaeological site is a kind of book. The book has to be read page by page. If you destroy these pages, you lose a tremendous amount of information."
While the destructive impact of looting on the study of human history has been recognised by scholars for decades, the public has only recently begun to ask questions due to seminal legal actions over looted objects.
One of the most celebrated was a trial in 1989 in the US midwestern city of Indianapolis. The case concerned possession of four fragments of a late fifth/early sixth century mosaic stripped from the walls of the small church of the Virgin of Kanakaria located at the extinct village of Lythrangomi in northern Cyprus.
THE MOSAIC DEPICTING the child Jesus, the Virgin, the apostles and an angel was fashioned by mystic monks out of tesserae of marble, glass and semiprecious stones. These were set in silver sockets and embedded in adhesive plaster fixed to the dome in the apse of the basilica.
The Kanakaria mosaic had survived the iconoclasm of the eighth century and Venetian, Ottoman and British occupations only to be looted after Turkey invaded the northern third of the island in 1974. Aydin Dikmen, a Munich-based Turkish dealer who employed a network of thieves, was responsible for much of the pillage. Jacques Dalibard, an expert dispatched by Unesco in 1975, reported what was happening and recommended that the occupation authorities should take effective measures to conserve the island's heritage. His report was shelved by Unesco and ignored by Ankara.
By contrast, the Indianapolis judge who tried the Kanakaria mosaic case took decisive action. He ordered Peg Goldberg, the local dealer who purchased the four segments from Dikmen, to return them to Cyprus. The judge ruled that a "thief obtains no title or right of possession of stolen items", and therefore " . . . cannot pass any right of ownership of stolen goods to subsequent purchasers" even if they contend they bought the goods in "good faith". The Kanakaria case discredited "good faith" as a valid argument for awarding disputed art and artefacts to collectors, dealers, auction houses and museums. Although the good faith principle still has force on the Continent, Britain follows the US in taking the view that stolen art is stolen art. Other European countries are under pressure to follow suit.
SINCE GOOD FAITH is no longer recognised as good practice, purchasers of hot art and antiquities can no longer abide by the maxim "Don't ask too many questions". Avid consumers of art and antiquities plundered from ancient civilisations are now facing censure and prosecution over looted artefacts in their collections. A multiplicity of claims have ensued.
Egypt is calling for the repatriation of a funeral mask on display at the St Louis museum; Peru is demanding Inca artefacts excavated early in the 20th century by a team from Yale University; France is seeking fragments of Hebrew texts stolen from the National Library in Paris. Last month Christie's auction house withdrew from sale five beams stolen during renovations from the mosque at Cordoba; Italy returned to Ethiopia a column looted in 1939; and Japan gave back a military monument stolen from Korea.
Marion True, formerly with the Getty Museum in California, is the first curator to stand trial for acquiring stolen pieces. Italy accuses her of purchasing scores of looted items from a dealer called Robert Hecht, who is also in the dock.
But the road to repatriation is not always smooth and the journey often takes years. In February, New York's Metropolitan Museum agreed to return to Italy a collection of silver stolen from an excavation in Sicily as well as a 1,500-year-old krater - a type of urn for mixing wine with water - decorated by Euphronios, the most famous painter of Greece's most creative period. Thomas Hoving, the curator who purchased the krater from Hecht in 1972, admitted in 2001 in a colourful series of articles that the "hot pot" had been looted from a site near Rome. Although Italy lodged its claim as soon as the krater went on display in the Met, the museum only agreed to hand back the pot five years after Hoving's article appeared. It will be repatriated in 2008, once the Italians make good on a promise to lend the Met exhibits of equal worth and beauty.
Cyprus has benefited little from the Kanakaria mosaic victory. Some 16,000 icons, frescoes and mosaics and 60,000 antiquities are still missing from the north of the island. Pillage and neglect of churches, monuments and archaeological sites have transformed this area into a wasteland, while in the south the heritage has been preserved and investigated by scholars who have added three millennia to the island's history, increasing it from 9,000 to 12,000 years. The emergence of two cultural zones on the island prompted Prof Edgar Peltenburg of Edinburgh University, Scotland, to observe that the study of Cypriot history has become "lopsided".
A brief bout of optimism was generated in 1997 following a sting operation mounted by the Cypriot honorary consul in The Hague, Tasoula Hajjitofi, reformed dealer Michel van Rijn and the Munich police. Aydin Dikmen, the Munich-based Turkish dealer was arrested and his hoard of 8,000 pieces, including 350 from Cyprus, was confiscated. But Dikmen was released from prison, and eight and a half years after his treasure was secured, it remains in Munich. The Cyprus government has been compelled to lodge a legal claim, in a Bavarian court, to well-documented artefacts, including a fifth segment of the Kanakaria mosaic. However, Dikmen has made a counter-claim, insisting he is the rightful owner of the treasures he pillaged. A win for him could amount to a disaster for all countries victimised by heritage thieves.
BECAUSE OF SUCH uncertainty on the legal front, the changing climate of opinion has not seriously slowed the rate of pillage. The appetite of dealers, auction houses and private collectors sustains the trade. Italy, Greece, Cambodia, India, the Balkans, Turkey, Egypt, and the countries of Africa, eastern Europe and Latin America are still being subjected to massive looting. Thousands of artefacts are leaving Iraq on a daily basis.
As soon as US and British troops crossed into Iraq in March 2003, thieves went to work at known and unexcavated sites, stripping away entire episodes in the story of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation. Insurgents are financing operations through the sale of stolen antiquitiesand 15,000 items are still missing from Iraq's National Museum. Iraqi treasures are appearing on the shelves of dealers and are posted on e-Bay.
There are three basic levels of operatives in the black market trade in art and antiquities: tombaroli, middle men and customers. Tomb robbers and customers are many but the middle men - wholesalers and primary dealers - are few and form closely connected mafias with regional specialities. Key figures at each level are known to the authorities as well as to scholars. Istanbul, Munich, Zurich, London and New York are hubs of the trade. Artefacts flow along routes used by drug dealers and arms merchants.
Since penalties for possession of loot are light, they buy art to launder profits from their other enterprises. As commerce in art and antiquities is valued at $5-6 billion (€3.9- €4.7 billion) a year, it is unlikely to cease unless countries enact strict laws and prosecute looters, dealers and consumers, and Unesco ensures that the heritage of countries in crisis is given effective protection.
• Michael Jansen will give a talk next Thursday at 7.30pm in the Walton Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin, to mark the publication of her book, War and Cultural Heritage - Cyprus after the 1974 Turkish Invasion (University of Minnesota, $30). Admission free